The agony of David Blunkett

The events which may lead to the home secretary's downfall are the stuff of tragedy

THERE are two remarkable things about the David Blunkett business. First, the home secretary may well have achieved a first in being a senior politician determined to prove that he is the father of his mistress's child—a determination that has greatly contributed to landing him in hot water. Second, although people prefer not to mention it, his blindness is central to how the story has unfolded so far, and how it will play out in the days ahead.

When details of Mr Blunkett's three-year affair with Kimberley Quinn, the married publisher of the Spectator magazine, first surfaced in August, there was lots of interest, but not much censure. The home secretary was a single man (his first marriage ended in divorce 14 years ago) and he had hoped to marry Mrs Quinn until she decided to end the relationship. It was a private matter: end of story.

That changed when, a fortnight ago, Mr Blunkett let it be known through his lawyers that he was demanding that Mrs Quinn submit to DNA tests to prove that he was the father of both her two-year-old son and an unborn child with whom she is seven months pregnant. All he wanted, he maintained, was to be able to contribute financially to the children's upbringing and have some access to them. Some observers were happy to take Mr Blunkett at face value; others, suspecting baser motives, saw him as an obsessive bully who refused to accept his jilting. Wherever the truth lay, it triggered a reaction from Mrs Quinn that, had Mr Blunkett been thinking straight, he might have predicted.

Last weekend, a series of allegations, apparently emanating from Mrs Quinn, appeared in the Sunday Telegraph, which shares the same owner as the Spectator. They implied that Mr Blunkett had allowed his private and professional life to become dangerously blurred to the point of abusing his office. The most serious charge was that he “fast-tracked” a visa application for Mrs Quinn's Filipina nanny. Others, more trivial, included the accusation that Mr Blunkett had breached government rules by ferrying Mrs Quinn around in his ministerial car and that he had given her two rail tickets paid for by the taxpayer. More bizarrely, it was also claimed that he had improperly used two civil servants to put pressure on her to end her marriage.

The charge that he had bent immigration rules was potentially lethal, so Mr Blunkett swiftly set up an “independent” inquiry under Sir Alan Budd, a former senior Treasury economist, to investigate it. But even before Sir Alan could start work, the Daily Mail produced two letters sent from the Home Office to the nanny which suggested that something funny had been going on. In the first, pro-forma, letter she was advised that her application could take a year to process. In the second, more personal, letter, sent only 19 days later, she was informed that she was free to stay as long as she liked. While not quite a smoking gun, immigration experts agree that this speed was highly unusual. Mr Blunkett's explanation is that at precisely that time, the Home Office was making a new effort to process straightforward cases more promptly.

Blind ambition

Although people are understandably reluctant to admit it, Mr Blunkett's handicap explains a great deal about how he may have got himself into this mess. It also explains, in part, why his chances of surviving his former lover's vengeful attempts to destroy his career are, even after the latest revelations, still better than if he were an ordinary cabinet minister engulfed in scandal.

Born blind and poor, Mr Blunkett has depended on bull-headed obduracy and a refusal to accept life's reversals to get to where he has. In the process, he has also had to make more than the normal sacrifices in terms of a lonely and unfulfilled personal life. Both ruthless obstinacy and desperation are evident in his clumsy attempt to use the courts to remain a part of Mrs Quinn's life.

Blindness has also played its part in the entangling of his private and professional lives. The private offices of ministers are there to help them in every way possible and relationships between ministers and the civil servants who staff them often become close. But Mr Blunkett's blindness means that he needs more than the usual amount of help to be effective, making it more difficult for both sides to see where the dividing line should be drawn. He admits to checking the visa application at the centre of the fuss to make sure that it had been completed properly. But to do so, he had to get an aide to read it. What happened subsequently is for Sir Alan to determine, but the fact that somebody from Mr Blunkett's office was involved increased the chances of the application receiving preferential treatment, even without any further intervention by the home secretary. Blindness may also have led to Mr Blunkett, never the most patient of men, having only a loose grasp of the voluminous rules governing ministerial conduct.

It would be crass to say that Mr Blunkett's blindness may also be what saves him. But the difficulties he has overcome have created a nagging suspicion, shared even by those who detest his authoritarian tendencies, that he is a great man. The near-universal admiration at Westminster (among both MPs and political reporters) for his achievement has meant that the baying pack usually found in pursuit of wounded ministers has been uncharacteristically muted. Even Michael Howard, the Tory leader, says that he hopes Mr Blunkett will be cleared.

That will help him in the difficult days ahead before Sir Alan reports. So too will his importance to a government short of the passion and the working-class authenticity that he brings to politics. But it is hard to escape the feeling that a tragedy is being played out. For once, to describe a political drama as Shakespearean is to give it no less than its due.